Dynamic Imaging of Nuclear Wave Functions with Ultrashort UV Laser Pulses

Non-Born-Oppenheimer supercomputer simulations of dissociative ionization of H2(+) with an ultrashort (t(p) < 15 fs), intense UV (lambda = 30, 60 nm) laser pulse are used to illustrate the imaging of nuclear motion. The resulting kinetic energy spectra of protons from Coulomb explosion lead by a simple inversion procedure to reconstruction of the initial nuclear probability distribution, i.e., laser Coulomb explosion imaging. Simultaneously, kinetic energy spectra of the ionized electron lead by energy conservation to the same reconstruction of the initial nuclear probability distribution, by laser photoelectron imaging.